3.1 Crisis of the Enlightenment
Last modified 05/16/2008
| The spectacle of the eonic sequence shows us a scale and depth of transformation that encompasses world history in its vastness and diversity. The significance of the modern transition must be seen in that context. And the result is a realization that modernity might be in danger of an excessively narrow focus in its realization of secular scientism, as a standard for the totality of culture. But we can see how our transition has already moved to compensate, to some degree, for this possibility. The breadth of the Enlightenment is one indication. Another clue lies in the so-called crisis of the Enlightenment clearly expressed in the 'dialectic of the Enlightenment' that appears with almost clocklike timing in the period of the Great Divide. In fact, the crisis of the Enlightenment is cogently expressed in the classic nexus leading from Rousseau to Kant. It is Rousseau who first produces that characteristic dialectic of critical modernity whose outcome will leave in its wake an enriched secularism that both expresses and potentially transcends the scientific revolution, whose gathering momentum will give first expression to modernity, yet remain dimensioned-down to a technological realization of secular culture. We can create a rubric for this 'crisis' very simply by looking at Newton himself, a man of diverse perspectives whose understanding of the limits of the new physics was implicit. This seed understanding gestates throughout the Enlightenment and finds expression most transparently in the writings of the philosopher of Kant who cogently both assumes and challenges the legacy of rising Newtonianism. This challenge takes the simplest of forms: the stoking of the idea of freedom in the context of causal mechanics. From these elements, and little more, Kant is able to suggest a fuller realization of the scientific flood underway, along with a bridge between the realm of science, as knowledge, and freedom, as action (or ethics). The suggestiveness of this revolution in thought completes at a stroke the foundations needed for a fully integrated culture of secularism. | ||
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